


Colours

by blueblood (sangreazul)



Series: chartered lives [1]
Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Friends With Benefits, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Multi, No One Died!, Nostalgia, Not Canon Compliant, Past, Past Relationship(s), Recreational Drug Use, Romance, Slow Romance, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:47:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27877849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sangreazul/pseuds/blueblood
Summary: Nate reflects on his past relationships and his current one.AKA.. Nate's been in five serious relationships in his life and only in one has he felt like he belonged.(tw: drug use, smoking, etc)
Relationships: Charlie Cutter/Nathan Drake, Nathan Drake & Elena Fisher, Nathan Drake & Samuel Drake, Nathan Drake & Victor Sullivan, Nathan Drake/Chloe Frazer, Nathan Drake/Elena Fisher, Nathan Drake/Harry Flynn, Rafe Adler/Nathan Drake
Series: chartered lives [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2098251
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Colours

**Author's Note:**

> i havent written anything for like a month so i wanted to just... IORENKLGMFDS it all out.. i had this idea for a while and no time to actually..... execute. it's mainly just me writing certain vibes/aesthetics so excuse the multitude of metaphors and flowery language lmao
> 
> (PS THERE IS NO BETA SO IM SORRY IF THERE'S A SHIT TONE OF MISTAKES)

They were young and loud and invincible when they started dating. Whether Nate could actually class it as “dating” was a different matter, though; he liked to say it was his first serious relationship, his first proper one, that Sam approved of anyway, but they were never officially exclusive and he knew that he wasn’t Charlie’s. They danced a lot, hit night clubs and stayed up until the sunrise greeted them as they left the brain numbing music behind them. If he was completely honest, he couldn’t remember a whole lot from it; it was fast and fun and he had never laughed that hard in his life. The drugs were hard and heavy, but they made the streetlights pop and neon signs shout at them all the way there and back. 

Charlie was definitely green; childlike and noisy, they would spin each other round to the music of their own yells and laughter in the middle of abandoned car parks and empty streets. Charlie’s car, a 1980s something-or-other Nate hadn’t really bothered to learn, but Charlie hadn’t shut up about, was pale green, or blue, he only really saw it in the dark, and they used to drive, windows down, through the city streets hollering in the late hours of the night. They would sing to the heavy instrumental beats and Nate would down his fourth bottle of beer and sling it haphazardly into the back seat. The lights from the streets would flash by them, glaring and bright: blue, pink, red, green. Now, if he found his mind drifting to Charlie, he could only picture him first with bright lights reflecting off his face, white teeth glowing in the night life. Charlie was the definition of his “night life”, his late teens and early twenties partying phase. 

Sam’s approval was way out of the picture by the time Nate met Chloe. He’d met a lot of new people around that era, desperately clinging onto new bonds to separate him from his painful past. It was weird how life became cyclical.

Chloe was mainly fun too, that and a whole lot of sex. Nate had decided he wasn’t doing feelings by that point and had walked out on more people than he would like to admit, but he always came back to Chloe. She was gleaming, shining, brilliant and golden. Her eyes, her skin, her lips, her hair: the sunlight sank into them beautifully, playfully. They spent most of their time together in various European countries, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Nate couldn’t quite pin it always, but where there was beaches they could be found. Playing in the sea, splashing each other with the clearest waters until Nate scooped her up in his arms and twirled her, making them both fall, crashing back into the gentle waves. 

Chloe had tried teaching him to surf a few times, holding herself back from laughing when he attempted to impress her or maybe seduce her with what could only be described as his lack of talent or skill in the sport. They watched sunsets together from plateaus of rocks or boulders in not much more than their underwear, the deep golden yellow sinking into their chests. 

Nate only decided it was time for him to go back to the States where she wouldn’t follow when he felt her eyes painting a picture of him and not the sunset. And maybe part of him regretted it, leaving so suddenly with no explanation, but he dreaded the day when her kisses became gentle because she wanted to savour the moment.

Flynn was sly and cunning and messy. Also only a few months after Chloe and maybe some in between. Every so often Nate would pass someone in the street who smoked the same brand as him and the thought would linger, cling to him for days. They spent most of their time together in Harry’s one-person apartment in the city and sometimes Nate wondered if he ever actually got to see his own shitty little apartment. They dated in the colder months mainly, when people got lonely and the sun’s heat wasn’t strong enough to warm them anymore. With the November skies, cigarette smoke and Harry’s dull wardrobe, there wasn’t much else he could describe that era as except for grey. Nate was angry and slowly losing fire when he kept walking away from treasure hunts with nothing but new scars. He told himself that’s why he did it, sat back and watched as Harry gradually fell in love with him; he needed someone to prove to him that he was still the Nathan Drake. And he liked the feeling of his eyes following him when he left the shower or changed his shirt. 

They were high most of time, Flynn had a dealer Nate never met, and they sat with gentle music in the background talking about complete and utter bullshit. It always ended up with them making out or having sex, and Nate was never sure who initiated it. Everything was just blurred, falling messily together, like trying to speak when you’re off your face. They celebrated Christmas and New Year together when Sully was half way across the world, by ordering junk food and smoking a joint. Everything except the stages in their relationship was slow, until Flynn confessed his love for him out loud. At first he thought it was joke, because Harry Flynn, the heartless bastard, could never admit to himself nor anyone else that he actually loved them. Then, when he realised he was serious, he knew it was time for him to find something new again.

Then Elena. Of course he had hook-ups and flings in between Flynn and her, but she really took the wind out of his chest. She was bright and bold. She was tender and sweet, while also being able to slap into the next week. God, he loved Elena, and thinking back, she was the first one to actually know him. Learn him. His obnoxious quirks and aggravating tendencies. She put up with all of them and cupped his face in her hands when he was upset. He came to her broken and lost and for once he didn’t only want sex to make it better again. In the lazy afternoons, they danced in her living room, he dipped her, brought their lips together. He was floating when he was beside her, baby blue glowing through the open windows. 

She was an angel until he finally broke her one too many times and she yelled at him to get out when he had just walked in. He posted the key to her small house through the letterbox the day after and skulked back to Sully’s car without saying a word. He couldn’t see blue for a while then, the sky was just bright or pale or dim, and his eyes in the mirror seemed more bloodshot than anything else. Then she and him, they talked all the plane journey back, Sully chiming in with silly or inappropriate remarks which made them all howl with laughter and his family was back together again. 

They kissed in the mornings and the nights, and held hands when they went food shopping. She flashed him award-winning smiles when she caught him gazing at her majesty, unable to tear his eyes away from her beauty. Her teeth were perfect, lips always pink, never torn, and her hands were smooth and uncalloused. He’d known from the beginning that she was too good for him, too stable and organised, too on top of it all for him to waltz in and ruin it for the thousandth time. So they sat down a year into their official marriage and talked. And Nate hated every second of it and they parted for seemed like the millionth time, but this time Elena took the ring off and made it into a necklace to honour him and the relationship. They decided their friendship was much more important than anything and the blue was finally brought back into Nate’s world. He could see it everywhere after that. 

Red; blood, lust, passion, loathing. It was a sign of wealth in many cultures, which, in that case, Nate had hit the jackpot. Rafe wore all black, clothes fitting and suiting him perfectly. His hair slicked back, jaw sharp, skin cared for, eyes deep. Nate wanted to kiss him everywhere, bite him too, leave deep red marks anywhere his teeth could reach. Nothing stopped him, Rafe certainly didn’t, and he didn’t stop him either when Rafe said it was his turn. Everything was red; the hatred and the blood it boiled, their lips, chapped and swollen, the marks around their wrists, the cuts on their cheeks. 

Nate lay awake at night, listening to his breathing next to him, feeling his chest rise and fall gently, and told himself that it was just a fling and giving into the urge to just up and leave would make it too real. So they lay next to each other every night and every morning and sometimes well into the afternoon, until Rafe told him in a haze of emotions that he was in love with him and all Nate wanted to say back was that he loved him too. 

Love was red, like the blood through his veins. As it turned out, his love for Rafe, his fascination, his greed and desire, had started long before he’d even met Chloe. That scared him the most, if he had to pick a point. It was mutual, though perhaps Rafe’s was deeper than that, which posed as a very vibrant, red flag, a warning and a caution; Nate was never one to listen to those. Rafe was his fifth “relationship” and second or third “serious” one, depending on who he asked. That fact terrified him too, shook his soul deep into its core, but Rafe was worth it, more than that actually. 

So, he cherished each kiss, watched Rafe’s reaction to nature’s beauty rather than the beauty itself, and took every opportunity to show him that he did, in fact, love him, and very much feel all the shades of red towards him. He could feel everything standing next to Rafe. Finally, after everything, they deserved each other and the mess they had created around themselves: Sam and Sully’s disapproving glances and Elena and Chloe’s odd jokes that they’d been replaced by the man who sought to kill him. Nate liked the excitement though, thrived under it, knowing he’d do anything just to kiss (or maybe kill) that man with the knowledge that the feeling was completely reciprocated by someone who deserved the shit and complication that came with dating Nathan Drake. 

Sometimes he wondered if the others knew just how closely they dodged a bullet there.


End file.
